Helmsman recently worked with an Australian resources company with international operations in remote and inhospitable environments.

Effectively managing operations ‘in the field’ is an essential part of this business. Managing their equipment and assets, and ensuring operational efficiency on-site has a direct effect on financial results.

“If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem, and one minute resolving it” – Albert Einstein

These words aptly represent the problem that exists with the traditional view of project controls - a parochial focus on the Delivery or Implementation stage of a project.

While project delivery is key to realising the value of a project, creating the value occurs primarily in the early stages of a project, and well before delivery gets underway.

Similarly, research suggests that cost of getting the early stages wrong, such as misdiagnosing the business problem, is up to 10 times costlier to an organisation than project implementation failures. In Australia, inaccurate understanding of requirements is the #1 primary cause of project failure (PMI, 2018).

However, the Project Management Office (PMO) can play a critical role in extending their organisation’s capability to successfully handle complexity. Common PMO goals include raising project success rates, effective portfolio planning, growing capability through access to specialist resources, providing cost savings through standardization, and improving project schedule and budget achievement.

The PMO’s view - of multiple projects from the past, those in-flight, and in the pipeline, across different business areas and project types, with qualified success rates - allows PMO’s to make five significant contributions to conquering complexity:

What’s a Complexity Cliff?

Helmsman’s 9-year research into the impact of complexity on project outcomes has uncovered a specific and consistent scenario where the likelihood of project success plummets – The Complexity Cliff.

This finding came from analysis that established an objective and accurate measure for assessing complexity – the Helmsman Complexity Scale. The Complexity Scale is used similar to how the Richter Scale is applied for building projects.